3 Tips for Succeeding with Direct Mail
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One of my favorite people in the print industry, Margie Dana, wrote a fantastic piece this week that was titled “How Direct Mail Packs a Punch in 7 Ways“.
If you are looking for ways to improve your marketing efforts, her article is a must-read. It provides inspiration and incentive for companies to use direct mail to reach their prospects and customers.
If Margie’s post does inspire you, I’d like to share a few tips with you as well. Here they are!
3 Tips for Succeeding with Direct Mail
For companies that run direct mail campaigns, the ability to effectively measure the highs and lows of those campaigns is vital to the success of their advertising as a whole. The following tips will have you well on your way toward making the most out of your company’s direct mail marketing:
- Utilize a tracking software system that will measure the statistics of your campaign easily and efficiently: Yes, there is no denying that it may cost less money to send emails than it does to send direct mail. However, if the act of sending direct mail to your audience could bring you better results, wouldn’t you want to do that? Of course! However, we must put forth the effort to prove that is true.This may primarily mean that we set up our campaigns and landing pages in a way so that direct mail responses are measured differently than responses to your emails, social media posts, or activities on another channel.
Response mechanisms such as QR Codes and personalized URLs can help us measure direct mail effectiveness as well!
- Select a focused audience versus conducting a blind mailing effort, thus increasing the potential for successful contacts: The days of spray-and-pray must be a thing of the past. This is certainly true from a budgetary perspective. But it also should be true from the fact that technology makes it easier than ever to create targeted, personalized materials and by doing so, we can increase our response rates.By segmenting our audiences, we can deliver direct mail pieces that may have text, images, and offers that are relevant to each individual.
- Ensure that your direct mail pieces are both informative and aesthetically pleasing: We must never forget marketing fundamentals. Sure, it can be fun to get excited about new marketing channels (i.e. I’m so excited that I can add a PURL to my mailers!) However, we must not neglect putting forth an effort to ensure our direct mail pieces look good and tell a compelling story.
These are just a few of the ways that companies can successfully incorporate direct mail into their marketing mix. If you’d like to learn more or perhaps see how interlinkONE’s software can help you in that regard, click here.
Tags Tips for Selling Marketing Services
One of the major challenges faced by a printer that wants to offer marketing services involves changing their sales strategies and tactics. There really is a big transition from commodity-based sales to solution sales. In my book Business Tranformation: A New Path to Profit for the Printing Industry, you will not find a how-to-guide on how to sell. Rather, you will find a chapter that focuses on the changes that you may need to make to your sales process. Here are a few of the items that you may need to change.
Identifying Other Opportunities
One of the biggest changes will involve taking the time to investigate what other sales opportunities may be available. Let’s think of the the example of a seminar.
A seminar requires promotional planning, production, and follow-up. Registering attendees, mail and email notifications, collection of registration fees via e-commerce, creating informational items, and much more, are all a part of putting on an event of this sort. In the past, your business may have only received a small portion of the work involved in those items; perhaps you were printing the postcards that invited people to the seminar. But as a marketing services provider, you will absolutely want to find ways to get more of that business.
How can you go about doing this? One thing that may help is to simply ask more questions. Find out how the company plans to promote their seminar besides the printed piece that you are doing. Also, share tips and advice with them to position yourself as a partner. Suggest that they can improve the success of their registration efforts with personalized URLs or QR Codes. Share statistics that demonstrate the lift some campaigns get by including emails and social networks in their promotions. Then, find ways to demonstrate how you can help them with those items too.
Formalize Your Sales Process
If your company has had the same sales reps for many years, there may be some folks that are used to doing the majority of their work on their own. However, the transformation into a marketing services provider requires a team approach.
To get everyone on board, you may need to put forth efforts to standardize your sales process, to hold weekly meetings to share ideas, problems, concerns, and successes, and to develop that tools that will help people forecast sales opportunities.
Find Ways to Automate!
Next, let’s look at sales force automation. SFA records all of the stages in a sales process. It also allows you to track all of your contacts. SFA systems are also capable of sales lead tracking systems, sales forecasting, order management and product knowledge. This creates a streamlined, productive environment for your sales reps.
This is not limited to your sales reps, however. Your marketing department will also benefit from SFA. As your customer database grows, your marketing department can do a few things with this. For example, they may be able to identify who your most profitable customers are. There are obvious benefits to this. This will enable them create a market of similar companies to target.
Also, SFA will help in understanding the competition. Any lost sales opportunities should be documented in the system. Marketers can examine trends and cycles among sales reps and help develop a stronger competitive strategy. Also, this helps marketers and sales reps work in tandem. If you are conducting a self-promotional campaign, that information should be included in the SFA system, including who was contacted and what their responses were.
There is also marketing automation. This allows you to send out consistent and relevant messages efficiently. Marketing automation enables you to automate marketing functions, including campaign creation, market segmentation, and response analysis. Simply the gathering of data that can be used to target your audience in a valued way.
Technology is your friend. Use it to make your sales and marketing processes more efficient and effective. You will see results.
Is There an Easy Button?
Jennifer Matt recently wrote an excellent post on The Web and Print blog titled “How Easy is Printing?”
If you haven’t read it, I’d definitely encourage you to take a moment to do so. Not only is it entertaining, but it’s inspiring as well.
The main point of the post is that to encourage people to print more things, companies need to make it easy for them to do so. While this certainly includes external processes (how hard is it for someone to order printing from your company), it also applies to internal processes.
Jennifer asks this question: “Do your systems require you to piece together data from various systems to give the customer a complete picture?”
Yes, if a printer needs to log-in and pull data from multiple systems in order to give timely answers and reports to a client, then that can certainly be considered a hassle among the printer’s staff. If it’s not easy for them to do their job, most likely the customer will not think that it’s not easy to do business with that printer.
The Sales Hat is Coming On
If that’s the situation that you find your print shop in today, here comes a sales pitch.
interlinkONE’s integrated, multi-channel marketing software is designed to eliminate the need for a printer to invest in multiple point solutions. Our ilinkONE Version 8 software is designed to allow you to build, manage, execute, and measure marketing efforts across a variety of channels — including print, email, web, social networks, mobile, and more.
It enables printers to easily generate and provide reports to clients that give them a full report on their activity — from landing page hits, to leads, to inventory counts, to popular products ordered, and more.
Time for a Demo
If you’re interested in learning more, I’d love for you take a moment and register for a demo of our solutions.
Can Direct Mail Help Your Website?
A recent report from GI Insight provided a couple of statistics to reinforce the effectiveness of direct mail.
While those with “ink in their veins” may wish the percentage was higher, I think that seeing this quote is fairly encouraging: “47% of UK consumers said that they are ‘more often than not’ driven to a website by something they have received” in the mail.
I also enjoyed this one: “43% said that they kept direct mail around the household in order to remind them to visit the company’s website in future.”
Yes, while social networks, emails, mobile, and other channels will continue to also drive people to the web, those channels may not necessarily have the ability to “stick” around someone’s house to remind them to visit a company’s website at a later date.
Of course, marketers may ask this question — how do I know if my direct mail efforts are driving traffic to a website?
Three Ways To Track Direct Mail and Its Impact On Your Website
Use Google Analytics to Benchmark Direct Traffic
Prior to sending out the direct mail piece, monitor and record the Direct Traffic that Google Analytics reports on your corporate website.
Then, monitor those numbers as the direct mailer starts to land in people’s mailboxes. While this is not going to tell you exactly how many people hit the website because they saw your URL on the mail piece, this approach may help you to gauge if the needle moved at all.
Yes, it may sound simple and less than scientific… but it’s something that should and can be done by anyone.
Use Personalized or Unique URLs on the Direct Mail Piece
Rather than printing your corporate website URL on the direct mail piece, use a custom or unique URL that will only be promoted to the people receiving the direct mailer.
That URL may simply serve as a redirect to the corporate website once it’s entered. Or maybe it points to a landing page that is embedded into one of your site’s pages.
This activity should help to serve as a good indicator if the mail piece made an impact.
Ask People!
This approach is often simple to execute and can result in solid data… but it’s often overlooked. In the contact forms that are provided on your website, add a question that asks people how they heard about you.
Also, train and encourage sales reps to ask new prospects that request more information if they received the mailer and then record it.
Moving Forward
Of course, direct mail’s impact isn’t necessarily measured only in the few days that it lands at the recipient’s house. As the 43% statistic above shows, people may store and return to that mailer at a later date — perhaps even weeks later. Thus, keep an eye on website traffic over the long-term to see if the impact of the mailer is still being felt.
Making Sense of the Marketing Services Provider Transformation
NOTE: This is Part 2 of a 9-Part Series on Becoming a Marketing Services Provider
No matter how you dress it up, a printer is a printer. Most printers would say that it is their price and customer service that will set them apart. If everyone has the same recipe for setting themselves apart, how much difference is there?
The Practical But Necessary Steps
Becoming a marketing services provider takes some time, and there are some non-negotiable steps along the way to make the transformation complete. First, it is necessary for the online presence of the printer to be inviting, friendly, easy to use, interactive, and functional. The ability for your customers to order online is an important facet of the printer’s transformation. Customers should be able to upload mailing lists using the printer as an email service provider. They should also be able to access and download information to be distributed or printed in small quantities.
But having an online store does not automatically make you a marketing services provider. The printer has to examine cross-media marketing. As I state in the book, cross-media marketing is, “a form of cross-promotion in which promotional companies commit to surpassing the traditional advertisements and decide to include extra appeals for their offered products. The material can be communicated by any type of mass media such as e-mails, letters, web pages, or other recruiting sources.”
So you have become cross-promotional and web-friendly. Now you need to execute some campaigns.
The Importance of Self-Promotion
You are looking to drive traffic to a retail store, whether that store is brick and mortar or digital, and increase sales. There are steps that can be taken to ensure a successful campaign. Create postcards with personalized URL’s or QR codes to attract the attention of potential customers. 80% of all printed material ends up in the mail, and who knows how much of that immediately ends up in the trash. So personalizing gives your efforts a much higher chance to be received than a standardized mailer.
Once the recipient accesses the URL, have them confirm some information to expand and provide accuracy to your database. Then drive them to either take a survey or claim their special offer that you advertised on the mailer. After a couple weeks, follow up with non-responders. When customers do come into the store in response to a direct marketing campaign, track that information to measure the effectiveness. If it’s not effective, go back to the drawing board. This should hopefully all lead to increased profits, data on marketing campaign strategies, and customer contact information. All of this lends itself to one of the most important ideas in marketing: return on investment (ROI).
The Secret to Success
Data is everything. Make sure you aggregate a solid database to help you in your marketing efforts. The best database is one you create yourself. The most relevant information to your business is only known by your business. A list provider can only be so specific to your target audience.
Hop on the Mobile Train
One more big aspect of this chapter is about making print interactive. I mentioned QR codes earlier; they are the best way to integrate new media into your printed efforts. They are two-dimensional barcodes that can be scanned by a smartphone, such as an iPhone or Android. Once scanned, they bring the user to a mobile website or landing page, creating an interactive experience for the customer. This mobile page will be stored in the phone for additional access later on, which means the proper information that you want read will be in the palm of the target audience’s hand.
The groundwork is being laid for the printer to become a full-fledged marketing services provider. In the next installment, we will talk about getting down to fundamentals to really complete the transformation.
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